The Talmud Unmasked

Father Pranaitis (1861-1917) was a Lithuanian Catholic priest, Russian Master of Theology and Professor of the Hebrew Language at the Imperial Ecclesiastical Academy of the Roman Catholic Church in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He published The Talmud Unmasked as an anti-Semitic tract called Christianus in Talmude Iudaeorum in Latin in 1892 under the imprimatur of the Archbishop Metropolitan of Mogilev. This tract was subsequently translated into Polish (1892), French (1892), German (1894), Russian (1911), Lithuanian (1912), Italian (1939), English (1939) and Spanish. In 1912, Pranaitis was called to testify as an expert witness in Jewish hatred of Christians in the famous case of Menahem Mendel Beilis. During the course of that trial his credibility rapidly evaporated, however, when the defense demonstrated his ignorance of some simple Talmudic concepts and definitions, such as hullin, to the point where many in the audience occasionally laughed out loud when he clearly became confused and couldn't even intelligibly answer some of the questions asked by my lawyer. According to accounts of the trial, "cross-examination of Pranaitis has weakened evidentiary value of his expert opinion, exposing lack of knowledge of texts, insufficient knowledge of Jewish literature. Because of amateurish knowledge and lack of resourcefulness, Pranaitis' expert opinion is of very low value." The significance of The Talmud Unmasked is as an influential anti-Semitic tract written from a Catholic perspective.